I didn't answer him
by Daringdoublebassist
Summary: "I was thinking about the blood on my lips. I thought 'I gotta look pretty before I see him', and I just spat it out. I shouldn't have- I was so vain!"


"I didn't answer him."

She held fast to those muscled shoulders as he cried, hot tears sinking into her night clothes, his mouth wide in horror and teeth pressing into her collarbone. Her head pounded at the base of her skull, and chilled pain crackled along her neck.

"He was calling for me, but I didn't answer him."

The cries became wails that slipped up his throat and broke, piercingly, from his crumpling face. She smelled the sweat baking on his hairline in the burning Wakandan heat, and tasted bile in her throat. It wasn't just his family that had been broken up.

"I was thinking about the blood on my lips. I thought 'I gotta look pretty before I see him', and I just spat it out. I shouldn't have- I was so vain!"

Her hands fisted in the hair at the back of his neck, trying not to remember the scene in which James Barnes faded from their world. Trying not to imagine what may have become of her own partner. Resolutely not thinking of the babies' fate until she could stop the room from spinning.

"I knew he was hurting, that he was scared." Steve sobbed, pulling back to look desperately into her eyes. His pupils grew, and eyes became wild. "But I wanted to be the one to make everything better, so…" His breathing quickened and he choked. "I just wanted to look pretty. I wanted to be able to make him feel better."

He huffed, fresh tears plopping from his eyelashes.

"Why did I do that Nat? Why couldn't I just answer him? Why didn't I comfort him as he went?" His forehead smacked down onto her chest. "I'm so selfish." He shivered over his next realisation. "It should have been me."

She couldn't be exactly sure what it was in his words that made Natasha shove Steve away from her and deck him. She felt his hurt, his pain, his sorrow. But she knew that Survivor's Guilt was poisonous, and logically, understood that it was pointless to express such a sentiment. In such incongruous times, when a Giant Purple Alien indiscriminately had wiped out half the universe's occupants, it would do no good to feel responsibility for surviving this fate.

With Thanos now ruling, maybe they too would cease to survive. Nobody knew the extent of his powers.

Steve gazed at her bewildered and betrayed. His blazing blue eyes tracked her movements as she reached for his big hands and took them in her own.

"You can't think like that, Steve." She told him, swallowing claggy mucous that seemed to want to escape from her stomach. Her concussion had caused quite a bit of vomiting – still, her stomach clenched violently.

"If it had been you, James would be here with me." She reconsidered that statement. "Or maybe I would be gone too." She failed to meet his eyes. "I think Maria was taken. I can't get hold of her, nor The Bartons. I haven't heard from the children." Her eyes closed and she wished for some kind of release from her body.

"I would swap with James in an instant, if it meant I could be with them. And then you would be together with James, and…" She swiped at misty eyes. The grief she'd tried to hold back crashed over her.

"I should have gone; not them!"

"Nat. No." Beefy arms came to cradle her as, without warning, all the adrenaline left her system. She slumped into him, defeated.

"Nat, I love you. I can't survive this without you." It must have taken herculean effort to turn himself from distressed to comforting, though her own emotional transformation had been immediate.

He pressed kisses onto her forehead, and told her "Your family would want you to live." His fingers stroked warmly over her clenched jaw.

"And just because you can't get hold of those kids, doesn't mean they're gone." He squashed her against his chest, muttering, "Buck would kill you if you were trying to give your life for his."

Natasha coughed, wetly. "I'm pretty sure he'd do the same to you."

"Then we must be even." Steve Rogers had not finished grieving, but having his best friend break down in his arms gave him a purpose. And this purposefulness provided him with questions. "What should we do, Nat, with Thanos? How can we make this right?"

Natasha sniffed and dabbed at her eyes. She should find her family – as first port of call, concussion be damned. After she knew their fate for certain, then she could attend to the fat-chinned purple alien who had taken her teammates away.

"Well, I think…"


End file.
